The Idea

JournalMap is a scientific literature search engine that empowers you to find relevant research based on location and biophysical variables as well as traditional keyword searches.

All publications are geotagged based on reported location information and plotted on a world map showing where the research was conducted allowing you to easily visualize the research occurring in specific areas and show you where data gaps might exist.

In addition to being able to search for literature geographically, JournalMap opens up the possibility to search for literature from similar areas. In many parts of the world, there has been little formal study of the structure and dynamics of local environments. However, research that has been conducted on landscapes that share similar soils and climates can, in many cases, be relevant to these understudied regions.

Where do these data come from?

The locations representing published studies in JournalMap come from the articles themselves. JournalMap uses geographic coordinates as they were reported in the original published paper. We standardize the coordinates to be in a consistent format (geographic, decimal-degrees), and attempt to correct errors in the reported coordinates when found. Also, study locations are represented at the level of precision with which they were reported in the original publication. Some authors report coordinates with a high level of precision, but some report only very general coordinates. Also, while most studies take place over an area (and this area can be very large in some cases), a single point location for a study (or a single point for each study area) is most commonly reported. At this time JournalMap is using only a single point to represent an article, but we will expand it to incorporate bounding boxes other polygon areas soon.

JournalMap contains article records from large geotagging efforts as well as those submitted by users. In both cases we use a combination of automated and manual techniques to determine the geographic locations of studies. Approximately three-quarters of studies published in the past five years included geographic coordinates. In many cases these coordinates can be detected and converted automatically. When coordinates cannot be detected or when only place names are reported, articles are geotagged manually. In the event that articles are geotagged incorrectly - due to errors in reported coordinates or geotagging mistakes - we have tools to correct these locations.

Why do this?

Scientists and resource managers struggling to deal with rapidly changing environments and evolving threats need quick access to relevant research and descriptions of natural systems. The advent of semantic and aggregation searching (e.g., Google Scholar, Web of Science) has made it easier to find useful literature across disciplines and publishers. However, the ability to find out what is known about a specific ecosystem, species or landscape is hindered by current search technologies that rely on keyword, topic, text, and author searching – concepts of publication cataloging and searching that date back to the late 1800's. Much of the published research conducted on ecosystems around the world is tied to specific places, and these locations can be exploited to search for literature based on geography in addition to traditional searching.

Project Acknowledgments

The ideas behind JournalMap evolved from discussions with many different collaborators over a number of years.

We are deeply indebted to Robin Metz, Ellinor Karl, and Jacob Karl for their help in compiling the initial set of articles and coordinates that became the JournalMap. Laura Martin and Erle Ellis provided a large set of geo-referenced literature records that were included in their 2012 Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment article. Genevieve Tucker, a student at New Mexico State University has invested many hours in geo-referencing articles and cleaning the resulting data. We greatly appreciate her work.

Finally, the original idea for JournalMap was derived from a large number of conversations and related efforts. These include discussions among staff at The Nature Conservancy, Idaho Chapter starting in 2010, a Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment paper written by collaborators at CONABIO and the Jornada in 2010, and a 2011 demonstration of an environmental similarity search tool developed by German Baldi.